Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

  The working people of the world are vastly outclassed in conflicts by the powers that be. In US history we can look at the Coal Wars, when the US military was used to protect the interests of coal companies by literally bombing the striking miners with planes. The US diverted military resources fighting World War I to attack its own citizens. Open conflict is inadvisable in these cases. The solution to fighting for the rights of the common person is the general strike. As Webster describes it, this is a tool of the anarchist—well, one of the tools. She claims that Mermeix defines three types of general strike: “ 1) the corporative general strike of the workers, 2) the Parliamentary general strike of the Socialists, and 3) the Revolutionary General strike of the Syndicalist leaders. ” She’s going to define each of them and I assume why they are all the tool of the Illuminati/Jews. For the corporative strike, she seems to be in support, writing that it was the only method that ...

We begin this section with Webster attempting to explain why the population would attach themselves to syndicalism rather than socialism. She writes that the workers were frustrated with their leaders taking trips to Switzerland and sleeping in gilded beds while they died on the barricades in France and Russia. This is a fair question and one of the likely reasons that the Internationale collapsed. This is a problem of any organization, the leaders appear as though they are living in luxury while everyone else grovels. It’s a system that looks especially bad for Socialism as everyone is supposed to be equal. It’s a valid issue to raise as the difference between theory and practice becomes practice. Our problem is in someone like Webster raising this issue. Webster has favored aristocrats like the Tsars of Russia, the aristocrats of the France, and even Napolean III. There is no way she can consistently raise the fact that a Socialist leader once staying in a hotel as a problem for th...

  We’ve done this before, back in the first French Revolution days where Webster did her thing mentioning something as crucially important, I do a bunch of reading on it, and then she drops it three sentences later. On the plus side I did not have to that much reading for this week, but her style is still annoying. To refresh the memory (I did have to refresh my own memory), syndicalism is another economic/political system. Socialism is equal distribution of authority and economy; the former was accomplished through some process of election or merit. Anarchy is a system where every person has a say in everything. Plato hated this form of government which he equated with Democracy. Aristotle believed Anarchy was a corrupt version of Democracy. People like Bakunin didn’t believe that any person should have more authority than anyone else, no matter what that meant for the rest of society. Syndicalism is a system wherein the various aspects of society are run by the experts in those...

Engaging with ideas is beyond the capabilities of conspiracy theorists, that’s why they are conspiracy theorists. They’ll give lip service to wanting engagement but in the end they just have their misdirection, ad hominem, and non-sequiturs. This weeks’ section is all three. Anyway Socialism/Anarchism is bad, so are Socialists/Anarchists. We have been reading a chapter that is supposed to be about the development of Socialist/Anarchist movements throughout the 19 th century but she really hasn’t delivered. What we have gotten are a list of petty squabbles, some gossip, and a list of bad things that her alleged enemies have done. She doesn’t address the arguments of these movements. It’s easier to raise the ire of people by discussing how they killed the Tsar of Russia. The course of Socialism should take us to America, and it does for two sentences when she mentions that American Anarchists led by Johann Most “ gave evidence of their presence by a dynamite explosion in the Haymark...

 Many of us took hobbies during the year of the pandemic, then decided that these hobbies were too much work, and went back to the conspiracy spiral on social media. Last week we met a person who did much of the same thing, Leopold Engel. Engel was going to restart the actual Illuminati, and like a person who doesn’t understand how difficult being a Dungeon Master actually is, abandoned the project pretty early. Webster is trying to weave her story, but at this point I don’t think she remembers what it is supposed to be. Engel’s group is out but Webster needs to carry it forward. So she changes gears giving us the “Philadelphes” group which was, possibly, the name of a Masonic lodge that used to be count Gracchus Babeuf as a member but not has a branch in London. Of course, the word “Philadelphes” just means brotherly love and is such an obvious name for a fraternal organization that it is almost a cliché. She quotes at length from an article in the New York World. This article isn...

  It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the Illuminati. For the last several posts we’ve been dealing with in-fighting between Socialists and Anarchists with the occasional Weishaupt reference tossed in. Mostly, the story has been about the failure of the Socialists to organize properly; but here we are, back to the original point of this book. “ The facts about this resuscitated order are very difficult to ascertain, for naturally they have been carefully kept from the public, and as in the case of the earlier Illuminati of 1776 every effort has been made by interested writers to conceal the existence of the society, or it must be admitted, to represent it as a perfectly innocuous and unimportant association.” The ultimate contradiction in conspiracy theorizing of the super secret societies is that they are successful at employing their plans (provided you excuse the fact that we do not live in their alleged utopia) but absolutely miserable at keeping it a secret. For peopl...